Your Sales Management Guru

At a recent workshop, “Building a Business in Challenging Times,” we discussed the role of sales management. I started to describe the various job functions of a sales manager, or what we believe at Acumen Management are the actions that must be focused on to build a high-performance sales organization.

I covered the concepts of training, metrics management, hiring/interviewing, sales coaching/mentoring, marketing campaigns and general operational management items that make up the day/week of any sales leader. The result of the discussion brought out Acumen’s theorem on “the rigors of cadence.” 

Successful sales organizations are managed with discipline, accountability and control. We will explore each of these words in the next three blogs. But let’s start with the concepts in the rigors of cadence, which means that sales managers must be rigorous in their expectations, challenging on training programs and they must perform their management duties of training, coaching, and operation management with a rhythmic pattern. This ongoing standardization and expectation brings a professional approach to everything, from the Monday morning sales meeting, to regularly planned sales training events, to the monthly sales management dashboard evaluation and to the quarterly salesperson development plan and formal review. 

Successful sales managers build process and a prescriptive methodology that creates the discipline, accountability and control that creates predictable revenue. Future blogs will discuss what we mean by discipline, accountability and control, and how to bring the rigors of cadence to your sales organizations.

Ken@Acumenmgmt.com

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Besides this blog and my regular RCP column, I publish a newsletter associated with my company, Acumen Management Group. In my latest newsletter, I mention the concept of creating a continency plan in case you have not built adequate pipelines/sales/marketing strategies to compete in more challenging environments. We recommended a plan if revenues drop 25 percent for what specific actions you might take. It’s a good time to rate/rank each employee in each department, etc.

However the most critical aspects from a leadership position are to: 

1. Communicate often. Hold monthly employee meetings, send weekly presidential e-mails that address the rumor mill and provide insights into your thinking, and give some positive news.
2. Avoid negativity. You need to bring energy to any situation, not drain it. Remember your body language, eye contact, voice and words are being carefully weighed by everyone.
3. Take the initiative. Look for actions to take that are meaningful and show your focus.
4. Promote teamwork and collaboration. When departments are combined or when you need two departments to work together more closely (sales/delivery), schedule regular meetings to discuss issues and address inefficiencies.
5. Confirm all new business priorities and plan to explain/sell them to all employees often.

Have you added this blog to your RSS feed or passed it to a friend? I am looking for ideas that you might want addressed in future articles, blogs or newsletters. Write me or check out my Web site.

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During the past few weeks as we have been leading our clients through developing potential business contingency plans for challenging times and during our workshops at the IW Business Builder programs “Build and Growth your Microsoft Practice in Challenging Times” (see Sharpening Up Your Skills), we have stressed the following element: Focus on brilliant execution.

What we mean by this is based upon a management program very popular in the manufacturing section called “Lean Management.” The program is based upon the concept that management and teams of employees must focus on each step of any particular process to eliminate waste/fat and therefore be more efficient and run the day to day operations more lean. At Acumen we are encouraging all our clients to consider setting up “teams” to focus on aspects of their operations, from delivery, to sales, to administration. 

The first step is to analyze and fully document each function — whether it is proposal generation to taking customer service calls — and seek ways to take out costs and increase efficiencies. Management must consider this is not a one-time event but an ongoing philosophy and a never-ending process. Once one function is worked on — and improved — move to another departmental area. 

For three months, we ran a series of newsletter articles titled the Sales Factory, breaking down the concept of manufacturing and how sales organizations must focus on production concepts to increase predictable revenue. If you want a copy of the three articles, send me an e-mail. 

If you have not visited and downloaded the Playbooks and exhibits for your SharePoint, UC, Project Mgmt and BI practices from our Microsoft workshops go to: https://partner.microsoft.com/us/bb. They are terrific for improving your business planning, marketing planning and sales strategy.
Ken@AcumenMgmt.com

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